Did the Big Bang violate the second law of.....

...with more than one brain cell at a time you mean?

Ah so, you now admit it's an explanation.

You assumed that I was presenting an indisputable fact all by yourself, though. It happens to be a rationalization (and we all know how dangerous those things can be)...

 

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I'd tell you the actual number, but since it's larger than 2 you wouldn't understand.

I didn't dispute that it's a possible explanation. But that wasn't how you presented it (and that was implicit in my reply).

Um, no. You state quite clearly

No hint whatsoever that it was one of a number of possible explanations.
Note the words "wasn't" and "was", not "may not have been" or "may have been".

 

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Oh God, he's at it again. Spouting more nonsense about things he really doesn't understand. You just don't learn, do you noodler?

The Higgs field requires a space-time and if there's a Higgs field why aren't there other fields, like the photon field? No one has put forth the claim that there was nothing but a Higgs field, you're just throwing together words you read in American Scientist. And ghost particles are not real particles, they are not physical particles (even on the same level as 'virtual particles'). 'Ghosts' are fake quantum fields put into calculations, when doing quantum field theory, which arise from a choice of gauge fixing. In many cases there's a number of ways to compute the physical answer and in some of them your choice of gauge fixing leads to you overcounting the number of physically distinct gauge configurations and you insert 'ghosts' to counter that. If you pick a different gauge you get different ghosts or perhaps no ghosts at all. Ghosts are not physical things.

Believed by whom? The spontaneous symmetry breaking of the Higgs potential has nothing to do with the BB. If you collider particles together at energies higher than a few 100 GeV you obtain the Higgs field pre-symmetry breaking, nothing to do with the BB.

I do read about it. I know people who work there. You are talking nonsense.

The fact those people are ahead of me or Dywyddyr has nothing to do with the fact you're talking nonsense which none of them have said. Unless you can provide a link to a published paper by one or all of them on such stuff?

You presenting your claims as if they were the ideas of mainstream well known people. You said "It's believed" and implied the people believing it are in the mainstream some how. That was further implied by you name dropping Penrose, 't Hooft and Smolin. If you want to ramble about stuff you don't understand go back to your Rubik's cube thread.

 

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Mod hat:

Please don't feed the trolls.

 

So it seems to me you would have problems with both....

and

 

I will be careful because I have been admonished politely for speculating about multiple Big Bangs and then adding speculation upon speculation. It seems appropriate that the topic is OK as long as it is addressed properly as an alternative to the standard cosmology which I refer to as Big Bang Theory with Inflation and the cosmological constant that says on a grand scale the universe is homogeneous and isotropic.

May if ask Fraggle Rocker courteously, when discussing your alternative cosmology, you have Big Bangs instead of the one Big Bang of Big Bang Theory. I picked up that you agree that there is only one universe even if there are or have been more than one Big Bang far removed from our observable expanding … this is where the question comes in. If there are or have been more than one Big Bang they cannot all be called universes since there can only be one universe. Do you have a term or a phrase to refer to each separate Big Bang, i.e. like the term I use, arena, or do you call them patches of space, or separate patches of spacetime, or what?

 

If it's is a one off, the word fleeting would be strange. I mean of all the one offs to have. We could have had a one off when an electron flitted in the middle of nowhere for a nanosecond. But no, the one off is that a universe was made and has lasted many seconds, to go for dry humor.

If you have infinite time and potential for radical diversions from the tendency toward greater entropy it seems to me you would also get universes that would run counter to the second law for long periods - chance and all. The poor slobs there would have a lot of trouble coming up with the second law, even if it seemed to hold on occasion in small spaces.

In such a universe, of universes, it would be hard to know what the exception is and what the rule is.

 

With a subject such as this, there can only be supposition and conjecture - in other words, just pure guesses.

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There's absolutely nothing at all to give us an indication of what happened prior to the BB or in the microseconds immediately following it.

However, there's also nothing that would lend any credence to some of the ideas presented in this thread - things like a "temporary" infinite universe - when all the evidence we've gathered so far indicates it's expanding and always has been. Another one is the thought that a universe could exist where the 2nd law is violated or even reversed. Simply no reason to even suspect that such a thing is even remotely possible.

Full truth be told, discussing this subject can be no more productive than speculating about the existence of Peter Pan or the Easter Bunny since there's precisely an equal amount evidence for their existence as well.

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What part of that do you think is news to any of us? Maybe the characterization of reasonable discussion of topics for which there is no evidence is the same as fantasy to you (and you are not alone) but some of us are capable of discussing these things as possibilities and no one invoked Peter Pan until you came on board. So the Peter Pan solution is yours, not anyone else's. It is fantasy and the discussion up until now has been a reasonable departure from standard theory, not fantasy.

Edit: But perhaps this should be moved to Pseudoscience.

 

No one has yet demonstrated a "reasonable departure from standard theory" - just idle speculation.

And I completely agree with moving the thread.

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Sorry for jumping on you like that. There is a perpetual disagreement about speculation and we won't resolve our differences on that subject.

 

I thought the point of several posters was that it is not a violation of the second law, since it deals in probabilities, if things run the other way on rare occasion. This seems like something to consider, at least, since we are running down from low entropy in what seems to be a finite time frame.

I disagree. It seems like we have the participation of at least one working physicist and this makes it seems like the speculation can be kept in line with what is known or seems to be true. I am not suggesting that we will solve any problems, but I will and have learned things from that reigning in of speculation and further, the speculation itself is interesting. Not all rational thought is inductive.

 

Apology accepted.

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There will always be disagreements on speculation and that's exactly why I prefer dealing only in facts and real evidence.

 

Those "points" are valueless. To the very best of our knowledge, the 2nd law holds true except for possibly some micro-scale events when compared to the the entire cosmos. In other words, we have absolutely NO indication of it ever failing to be true. So attempting to say otherwise IS engaging in idle speculation.

Allow me to just say this about the type of speculation going on here: it belongs in the field of philosophy MUCH, MUCH more that it does in physics or any other of the physical sciences.

While it IS true that scientists speculate, they *always* do so from an existing, proven and sound basis. And never by simply pulling ideas from thin air without any foundation to start from. And for this particular topic, there isn't any foundation/basis to start from. That's my whole point and exactly why I introduced Peter Pan and the Easter Bunny into the discussion - just other simple examples of more idle speculation without basis/foundation.

 

OK. I take this under advisement, though I would like to hear from (other?) physicists on this. I want to make it clear that I did not take the others to be saying the law failed, but rather that local exceptions could also be enormous, given adequate time.

Allow me to just say this about the type of speculation going on here: it belongs in the field of philosophy MUCH, MUCH more that it does in physics or any other of the physical sciences.

I am skeptical about this since I have read similar speculations made by scientists - similar to Fraggle Rocker's. I am not sure what you mean by 'from an existing, proven and sound basis'. It seemed like the authors I read were trying to make sure they were not contradicting current theory, but it was speculation and thus not all or even mostly proven or necessarily sound - though coherent and as far as they knew compatible with current knowledge.

Some examples. I just did a guick google to show I am not talking out of my ass.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/may/05/spaceexploration.universe
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/big-bang.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070702084231.htm
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090113-st-before-big-bang.html

Here is a physicist whose research into other universes - and other Big Bangs - led to predictions that so far have been confirmed.
read under research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mersini

You may or may not respect these people, but I do think scientists do talk about these kinds of things, and I would guess a good deal of their talk involves speculation, that is then reigned in, then more speculation, and more reigning in. That they keep speculating until they have something that is at least compatible with current knowledge, then see if perhaps it helps explain something that is currently vexing, then look for ways to test. Obviously we cannot do this on the level of physicists, those of us who are not physicists. On the other hand, I think we will learn things from exploring these ideas, especially if physicists take part. If they are not interested and do not participate, then I agree, it would probably fit better in Philosophy.

 

hmm I don't think the big bang even happened.

 

Must keep in mind that in science there's a huge difference between functioning models and proven facts. A great many people tend to forget that. The Big Bang model is hypothesis, but it's a hypothesis build by stringing together bunches of observations or real data, and more hypotheses based on other data, and more hypotheses based on those hypotheses. It's like a big bunch of theoretical constructs which have been developed by different people over several decades which have been developed to fit together, which may seem to make it rather fictional in nature, except that the model has worked well enough to allow many accurate predictions.

I should point out, however, that an accurate model which allows accurate predictions does not actually make something true. Example: Ug the caveman sees someone fall off a cliff and die at the bottom. Ug hypothesises that if someone steps over the edge of the cliff, Gimpy the big invisible sky god smashes them down to the ground with a really big hammer and kills them. Ug predicts, based on his model, that if more people step over the cliff, Gimpy will attack and those people will die. So Ug pushes a hundred people over the cliff, and they all die. His model has proven very accurate. It has provided measurable results. It allows very accurate predictions. But it's completely freakin wrong, which Ug's descendants won't figure out for many thousands of years. So there is a very big difference between a working model which allows predictions and provides seemingly accurate and measurable data, and truth.

 

Hey, Fraggle, I think you are mixing Read Only and me up in your quotes. My whole post there was support for the speculation you and I and other were doing. I brought in the links because I was being told that scientists would not do this. But there they are, doing it. In fact science demands that one start off with speculation.